April 28 - The modest building at Main and Mill streets in downtown Aspen was built in 1891 for $8,000. Last week, it sold for $8.7 million.

A team of local businessmen sold the historical building to a Miami couple, Abel and Fana Holtz. The two-story, 34,000-square-foot building is home to a trio of Aspen eateries, including Vinh Vinh, Farfalla and La Cantina, at street level and a few offices and employee apartments on the second level.

The sale mirrors the Aspen area's skyrocketing land and home values. Sales in the upper Roaring Fork Valley are already on track to surpass the $1 billion mark this year, and commercial real estate is at a premium.

"It's impossible to build new commercial space in Aspen," said Andy Hecht, a local attorney who was a part owner of the building, known as Chitwood Plaza. "My sense is (this buyer) wanted to own a significant piece of property in Aspen. I don't think the person who bought this building was in the market for just any building."

Abel and Fana Holtz were unavailable for comment Friday.

The businessmen who sold the building - including Stephen Marcus, Ronald Garfield and Arthur Pfister - bought it in 1998 for "somewhere around $5 million," Hecht said.

Chitwood Plaza has a long history in Aspen. It was built in 1891 during the mining town's building boom, when as many as 75 buildings were constructed. First it was a YMCA, then a mining office, then a bank and then a boot store.

In the early 1900s, the building was a mechanic's shop, with second-floor apartments. Twenty years ago, the building was gutted and converted into restaurants and office space.

In the 1970s, the building could have fetched about $400,000, said Brian Speck, president of Stewart Title, which records all real estate transactions in Pitkin County.

By the early 1980s, Speck guessed the building could have been worth $1.5 million.

"This buyer is obviously counting on continued appreciation, which we are all hoping continues to happen here," Speck said. "They are not going to make money on rent for this.

"But it's an interesting sale for this town because there just aren't many commercial buildings available." The sale leaves the already lonely commercial real estate marker in Aspen with a single building on the market.

"This is obviously going to have some effect on new (commercial) buildings that come up for sale,"

said Nick Coates, of Coates, Reid and Waldron, a local real estate company that sold $202 million worth of property last year. "But we have a different market than most places and there's a lot of money around today."

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